Not even a pipe dream: John Akomfrah represents Britain at the Venice Biennale | Venice Biennale

The British National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the world's largest and most important arts event, begins with a video of Holbein's delicate drawings of the Tudor court carried away by the swirls of a stream and ends with the death of an Anglo-Nigerian, David. Oluwale, drowned in a Yorkshire river after being beaten by local police in 1969.

Along the way, in filmmaker Sir John Akomfrahs' exhibition, a sumptuously told visual and aural story of migration and colonialism unfolds, held together by the image of flowing water. The culmination is the arrival in Britain of the Windrush generation, those who emigrated from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom in the years after the Second World War, often to work in the British public services.

Referring to the Windrush scandal which followed the Guardians' revelations in 2018 that many elderly former immigrants from the Caribbean were being blocked from accessing healthcare in the UK or threatened with deportation, Akomfrah said: “As soon as you assume something is resolved, that's when it bites the most. You. [It] absolutely shocked me; I really thought we were beyond this very obvious, slightly punitive, slightly provincial view of Britishness as just whiteness.

The rhetoric of that moment felt, he said, like a strange throwback to the 1960s.

His multi-screen, multi-faceted, multi-piece video work, titled Listening All Night to the Rain, has poetry at its heart. Its eight rooms are called cantos, alluding to the poet's most famous work. Ezra Book. The way each of these chants works is a kind of collage, everything mixed or connected in some way, each one a kind of dig into a specific economic or political past, he said.

He was, he said, generally optimistic, but certain aspects of modern Britain had taken him by surprise. What I didn't expect was that the language of empire would be played out with a cast including several prominent actors of color, he said, referring to Black and Asian politicians serving in the British Conservative government, appointing Secretary of State for Business and Commerce, Kemi Badenoch and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman.

It's a deeply discouraging and depressing experience, he added.

Akomfrah, 66, said he accepted the invitation to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale without hesitation. Britain is where I come from, more deeply than anywhere else, and to be able to participate in it, to speak with her, certainly not speaking for her, but with a voice that comes from her, was very important.

Akomfrah was born in Ghana. After his father was killed in political turmoil in 1966, his mother fled with him to the United States before settling in London. He began his artistic career in the early 1980s as the founder of the Black Audio Film Collective.

If you had told me Black Art Convention in 1982, if I was at the British pavilion in Venice, I would have laughed. It wouldn't even have seemed like a pipe dream, but rather a joke, he said.

His 1986 film Handsworth Songs focused on the aftermath of the Birmingham and London riots of 1985. Among his important works is his 2012 film on the legacy of cultural theorist Stuart Hall, The Unfinished Conversation. His film Four Nocturnes was presented in the Ghana Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019, reflecting on environmental destruction and the human cost of the climate crisis.

This year's Venice Biennale includes 88 national pavilions in the city's public gardens, the Giardini; in the historic Arsenale; and in locations across the city. Benin, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Senegal, Timor-Leste and Panama will participate for the first time.

Geopolitics never swims far from the surface at the biennial. Artists and curators at the Israeli National Pavilion have announced that they will not open their pavilion until a ceasefire and hostage release agreement is reached.

Russia will be absent for the second consecutive edition. In 2022, pavilion curators and artists recused themselves from the event. This year, Russia decided not to participate but is hosting Bolivia in its large pre-revolutionary pavilion, although on the first day of previews it remained closed and workers undertook renovations.

Each edition of the biennial is anchored by a large-scale main exhibition, occupying the vast Corderie Renaissance (rope-making workshops) of the Venice Arsenale and a pavilion in the Giardini. This year's guest curator, Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the São Paulo Art Museum in Brazil, is the first Latin American in the history of the event, founded in 1895, and the first to live and work in the whole world. south.

His exhibition is called Stranieri Ovunque Foreigners Everywhere and features the largest representation in event history of artists from Africa, Asia and Latin America. He also focused on self-taught, queer and indigenous artists, those who are considered foreigners in their own country, as Pedrosa puts it.

With a resurgence of figurative painting throughout the exhibition that would have been unthinkable ten years ago, and relatively few video and moving image works, Stranieri Ovunque Foreigners Everywhere brings together not only contemporary works but also 20th century art from a wide range of countries, including Bali, Haiti, Morocco, Mexico, Singapore and Lebanon.

Sections of Akomfrah's work, commissioned for the Venice Biennale by the British Council, will be exhibited in the UK in 2025 at the National Museum of Wales, the Whitworth in Manchester and Dundee Contemporary Arts.